


perhaps there is no god at all

by anatomied



Category: Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Canon, not really supernatural ghosts though, really not very shippy it's about coping you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 20:03:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11585226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anatomied/pseuds/anatomied
Summary: Veronica, until graduation.(Or: somehow, impossibly, she lives anyway.)





	perhaps there is no god at all

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a weird mix of musical and film, taking elements I liked from both. I took the movie version of everything taking place in Veronica's junior year and more of that Veronica's personality and slammed it together with a more musical-esque relationship and the JD-in-looks we all know and love from the bootleg. Features _Crime and Punishment_ , Victorian flower language, and growing up.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy this weird little coping-with-death-and-guilt piece. I may come back to visit some more Heathers stuff too. It's just what happens when my friends and I stage a late night rewatch.

The scorch mark on the football field lasts all the way through the rest of junior year.

It is too big to simply pull up the dead grass, and it would take too long to grow back. Five weeks after JD blew himself to tiny, tiny bits in the middle of Westerburg’s pep rally, Veronica sits down in the stands with Heather McNamara and watches the football team, minus Kurt and Ram, play. She knows it’s going to be a mistake, but she goes anyway.

“It’s not the same,” Heather mutters, picking at a loose thread on her skirt, “without Ram and Kurt, huh?” She took a break from cheerleading after her suicide attempt, replacing it with trips to a therapist. Veronica thinks that’s a good thing, even if they don’t talk about it too much.

“Nope,” Veronica agrees. She pops the _p_ sound gently and stares out at the blackened remains of the grass. They went to the 7-11 after school, and Heather’s straw scrapes along the bottom of the plastic cup, trying to get any remains of cherry slushie out of the bottom. _Cherry_ , Veronica thinks, and she moves her arms around her torso, squeezing hard enough to hurt.

_Ugh_ , the ghost of Heather Chandler hisses, kicking Veronica in the back. _That sound is so fucking obnoxious. Tell her to quit it, Veronica._ Next to her, Ram and Kurt shout curses and jabs at the other team or talk about the cheerleaders’ asses. Football hasn’t gotten quite the turnout it usually would since a kid spectacularly died out on the field, so there’s plenty of room for all of Veronica’s ghosts on the row behind her.

Well, almost all of them.

The rest of junior year is proving to be a practice in small blessings, and one of her favorites is that JD’s ghost has never seen fit to show up. Instead, it’s the usual. The mythic bitch immortalized as Mother Teresa and the two dumbass football players who have become figureheads for the dangers of intolerance and prejudice in Sherwood, forever following her. Projections of guilt, or so Veronica’s vaguely self-diagnosed.

No one, so far, has tried to turn JD into a saint.

Veronica almost thinks that’s a shame. If anyone had something close to the right idea about something - that none of this matters, and that high school is hell, and that people are just generally shitty - it was him. If it wasn’t for the delusions of grandeur and the murderous intentions, maybe he could’ve had a gospel worth preaching.

It’s just another cruel societal irony.

A shape wearing Westerburg colors hurtles across the goal line, collapsing as he barely makes it. Heather jumps up and cheers with the rest of the crowd. Veronica remains seated, cheeks hollowing around the straw of her slushie until all she can taste is sour raspberry, blue climbing upward into her mouth.

\---

Veronica signs up for Russian literature.

There’s no good reason behind it - she needs one more elective, and the only other interesting one that fits into her schedule is basic German. _Ich lüge_ , her brain fills in as she stares down the listing, and it’s right, she really does.

\---

The house boils over.

The air conditioner is working on overdrive, something hot and horrible living in the town. Veronica buries her face in her pillow and screams into it by the third day of her vacation. She had all of this planned out, when her and JD started dating - how they could go out for a drive, maybe, or sit around and talk, watch bad movies, go on dates - and now she’s stuck in her fucking room, no one to talk to besides Duke, McNamara, or Martha.

The rest of the school’s kind of scared of her now, too scared to invite her to anything. Veronica with the crazy dead boyfriend, Veronica almost scorched by hellfire, Veronica with the red scrunchie, Veronica who survived.

_What the fuck did you expect_ , Heather Chandler snarls over her, stinking of vomit and something chemical. Her nails dig hard into Veronica’s shoulders like they always used to, a millimeter of pressure away from breaking the skin. _Now you know how I felt every day in that dumb cafeteria, you cunt_ —

Veronica slams her fist against the pillow, the sound flat and lifeless. _I wanted_ , she thinks nearly viciously, but really, does it matter what the hell she wants?

\---

JD finally makes his grand entrance a month and a half into summer.

Her, Martha, and McNamara are watching _Evil Dead II_ , passing a bowl of popcorn between them. No ghosts tonight. Maybe they’re busy doing whatever they do in Heaven - or Hell. Veronica is enjoying the night, really. It’s nice. They ordered pizza earlier, box empty on the coffee table, and Heather’s sitting on the floor right in between Martha and Veronica. They’re laughing at all the right moments.

It’s good. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s not surprising when it all goes wrong.

She stops laughing at Heather’s little comment about Ash and turns back to look at the television. Her heart plummets and climbs all at once.

JD leans on the television, mouthing right along as Ash mutters desperately about _something that’s come back from the dead_.

Veronica nearly drops the bag of popcorn on Heather’s head. Her hands spasm around it, paper crinkling under her hands. JD gives her a little wave, _greetings and salutations_ in everything but words, plus a tiny shit-eating grin, and then he’s gone. “Fuck,” Veronica hisses, too soft for either of her friends to hear. She glances down. There’s a hole nearly torn by her grasp in the bag, and she quickly passes it off to Martha so she doesn’t just rip the fucking thing right in half.

It was a matter of time.

\---

It turns out that JD is less of a persistent ghost than the rest of them. He’s actually more of an opportunistic ghost. Half of her is convinced that it’s just because she knew him for less time. Her shitty projection of him had a few months at most to really acclimate; she had years with Chandler, Kurt, and Ram. The other half of her, however, just thinks that JD was always the opportunistic type. So maybe Veronica got to know him too well.

Flip a coin. Either way, she’s screwed.

She chooses _Crime and Punishment_ as her summer reading from a whole list of Russian novels. The irony is intentional. After all, the best way to get through summer reading is to choose something that’s relevant to you in some personal way. Her mother picks her up a copy from the bookstore for a few bucks. By the time she convinces herself to actually open the book, it’s one in the morning on a Tuesday and her whole body feels frozen at the cover itself. Crime and fucking punishment. It’s not even funny, but now she’s committed.

Veronica starts reading about Raskolnikov and his terrible crime, how guilt can fester in a person and become the monster.

Hands settle on her shoulders, heavy dark fabric brushing against her side. _Hey, babe,_ JD murmurs, _what gives, huh? Feeling guilty? Feeling a little bit like you should be in a fucking cell right now?_

Kurt and Ram, nicely on cue. _Girl-on-girl! Right on, punch it in._ Veronica wants to kill them. Again. She wants to _hurt_ , to hurt anyone, herself or them or especially the stupid brilliant egotistical boy behind her with the dark smile and lips swollen from biting them when he’s thinking too deeply.

Veronica whirls around —

— and she sees the specter of a boy - dark curly hair, brown skin, tall and haunted (haunting?) in a long black trenchcoat, heavy fabric stained darker with something vital —

— tastes smoke and ash

(him on her tongue, his tongue in her mouth)

and Dostoevsky’s discussion of justice and acute suffering hurtles through him, bounces off the wall with a thwack, and lands perfectly in the trash can. _Nice one_ , JD tells her. Amused. Veronica is amusing to him, always and nothing more than that.

“Fuck you,” she snarls, more animal than girl. He turns her into this thing, an approximation of herself in the skin of something colder. JD grins wildly, hair perennially unbrushed. _That’s good_ , he breathes, and he’s right in front of her, stinking of ash and grass and _him_ (a cheap but good cologne you can buy in any Walmart nationwide, sweat, gunmetal). _Get angry. Anger’s good, the only way to get through this, and trust me, I would know._

“Get through what, asshole?” she snaps, stepping back. The chair digs into her back.

_Grief_ , he says. Then her mother shouts up the stairs about dinner, and Veronica is alone.

\---

She doesn’t fucking _grieve_.

Veronica vowed she wouldn’t, and she didn’t - not for Chandler or Kurt or Ram. So why now? Rule one of being a good person: don’t empathize or grieve for actual murderers. She’s no woman sending Ted Bundy fawning letters in prison or staring longingly at photos of the Manson family patriarch. JD was a murderer. He killed people without remorse. He was planning to kill more. It should be that simple. One plus one equals two, and dead murderer plus her should equal relief and a sense of justice.

It doesn’t.

All this because she didn’t go to a funeral? What would her and JD’s dad have to say to each other over his grave?

What the hell did they even bury? Pieces? Ashes? A symbolic thing like another stupid overdramatic coat? Hell, his dad probably threw some explosive in the box and said good enough, since that was something he loved more than his own son. There was no reason to go out there. JD is gone. A body is just something the mind lives in - and there’s so much horror, really, in fully understanding how the self is merely electrical impulses and chemicals.

Sometimes JD would talk about that, tired and worn around the edges. Maybe that was why it was easy for him to kill himself, in the end. You’re an irreplaceable human soul, sure, but since when has that ever stopped anyone from suffering?

\---

Heather Duke calls her on a Saturday and asks to grab coffee with her. Veronica’s first response is a visceral _no_ , possibly swinging all the way into _fuck no_. The words tick at the corner of her jaw, practically a snarl. It takes her a full three seconds to realize that the response is the JD-esque response, to put it mildly. To isolate. To refuse to connect. To refuse to forgive.

And some people don’t deserve forgiveness. But most do.

_Heather Duke is seventeen_ , Veronica tells herself. _Seventeen-year-olds are barely even people. They aren’t the people they’re really going to be yet._

“Okay,” she says flatly. “But if you bullshit me, if you show up to start being a new proto-Chandler all over again, I will absolutely just leave.”

Duke pauses. “No,” she says primly, “I think we’re both done with that, don’t you?” And that in itself is so gloriously petty, but wrapped up in such sympathy.

It nearly makes Veronica laugh into the receiver. Instead, she grips her phone a little more tightly and exhales, winding the cord around her hand. Things change, but things also stay the same. How philosophical. “I’ll be there at ten.” She regrets agreeing almost instantly. Duke and her exchange some pleasantries, bullshit about classes and friends and high school. It’s almost normal. It would be normal if not for the specter of four dead kids hanging over them like a guillotine.

She hangs up and glances back towards her bed. The blade falls. JD’s laying there, flipping through her copy of Crime and Punishment again. _Give it to me straight,_ he says. _You’re Raskolnikov, right? And I’m not a character, so to speak. I’m your higher moral conviction in the beginning here, I’m his essay, ‘On Crime’ or whatever. Or I’m Raskolnikov and you’re Sonia, but that’s a lot less fun, don’t you think? Sonia’s too pure and angelic, except for the forced prostitution, I guess. And I’d have to be in jail._

“Stop drawing parallels,” she mutters, shrugging off her jacket. “Besides, you’re dead. That’s basically the jail of existence.”

He pauses in the midst of turning a page.  _Aren't parallels the God damned point?_

Veronica hangs up the jacket and doesn’t say a word. By the time she moves to sit on the corner of her bed, there’s no one else there at all, the book where she left it on her pillow. Sweet dreams, after all.

\---

At the coffee shop, Duke starts crying thirty minutes after they sit down at a table in the corner.

Being Heather Chandler, Veronica decides, would break anyone over time. It broke Chandler herself, the obvious expert, in a thousand different barely noticeable ways. Veronica passes her a tissue from her purse, primly turns away as Duke blows her nose loudly and tries to preserve her makeup. “How do I look?” she asks stuffily, crumpling the tissue in her hand. They’ve gotten a few looks, but no one seems to be trying to come up to console the girl in the beautiful red suit.

Veronica stares at the tear-streaked face in front of her, eyeliner running dark down her cheeks. “Like yourself,” she says softly.

\---

She can’t fucking write college essays. That was the plan for the summer - to get ahead on college applications, to get into Harvard or Yale on the back of her writing. But now every single prompt swims against the back of her eyes - _what was a moment that changed you, an event that sparked a period of personal growth, when you challenged a belief_ \- and mapped onto all of them is junior year.

You can’t just write things like _I killed someone and thought I liked it but then I realized I was too scared to admit to the boy that tricked me into doing it that I was scared to begin with._

You can’t say _I grew a fucking backbone through watching my boyfriend blow himself up on the football field._

And you definitely can’t say _my projected self-loathing is vicious and sounds like the queen of my high school, two jocks, and a deluded rebellious murderer._

Really, Veronica is beginning to realize that there’s a lot of things she’s going to take to her grave. There’s no question of whether she’s Raskolnikov or Sonia any more. Only one of those characters agonized over murder and let it follow them all the way to Siberia. The metaphor is far from perfect, but it works well enough.

She lays flat on the floor of her room and stares up at the ceiling, enjoying something blissfully clean and blank and empty.

\---

The yearbook for last year has a two page spread dedicated to Chandler and another two page spread dedicated to Kurt and Ram. There is a mention of Jason Dean shoved behind them, barely covering half of the page. The rest of it is dedicated to the way Westerburg came together to talk about the plague of suicides, a photo featuring Fleming’s grinning face, smugly smiling at the camera, right in the center of the feature.

In _Crime and Punishment_ , Ilya trills out: "Look at these suicides, too, how common they are, you can't fancy!"

_How common they are_ , Veronica thinks, fingers tracing over the familiar curve of JD’s jaw, his eyes staring darkly at the camera. Westerburg even got a grant from the great state of Ohio to hire an actual mental health professional next year. So maybe all the suicides did do some good in keeping Fleming’s attention-hungry little hands off of students’ deaths.

Some part of her couldn’t help but doubt it. Adults didn’t know - didn’t care to remember high school, maybe. The adults that did were incredibly fucking rare, and when they did exist, they wouldn’t be the type to move out to Ohio, of all places.

Today, her mother tried to bring up the topic of dating over dinner, her eyes flickering towards her father nervously. _You know, darling, you’ve just been very sad since all of that business at the end of the school year, and we just want you to know that if you find someone else, another boy -._

_I don’t want_ , Veronica ground out, _another boy, mom. I don’t want any boy. I’m going to be busy with college prep_.

If they had moved back in time another decade or two, Veronica’s sure her mother would have wrung her hands in despair. Instead, she got a few squawked reminders that high school only happens once, and all she wanted to do was laugh. Thank God high school only fucking happened once. Any more than that might kill her.

It really might.

\---

Senior year doesn’t let her fade into the background. Everyone who’s not a freshman remembers her - remembers the way she strode into the hallway and dethroned Heather Duke with a kiss on the cheek and something between a request and a threat to the entire student body.

She sits through her classes - a Socratic seminar in Russian literature, a lab in physics, a review in French, on and on - until she gets through the first day, and then she walks herself to the empty lot near the school and throws up.

A familiar hand rubs her back, his palm warm against her spine. _Easy,_ JD murmurs. _Don’t pull a Chandler on me, now._

_Oh, fuck you,_ Chandler seethes on the other side of her.

Veronica wipes away spit and vomit, shaking herself back upright. “Go fuck yourself, Jesse fucking James,” she snarls. The mythic bitch’s words feel good in her mouth. Like a defense. It’s easy to understand why Heather lashed out so much - how _good_ it feels to get back at someone who’s trying to hurt you.

“Veronica?” Martha’s voice comes out very small behind her. “Are you okay?”

Veronica spins around. Dunnstock’s staring at her, bag slung over her shoulders and her whole body hunched forward with something nervous. It’s old body language - from when the Heathers were nearby. It’s fear. “Yeah,” she says thickly, her throat stinging with bile. “I just was thinking - about JD. About last year. All of it.”

Martha frowns. “I thought you said you were over him.”

“I’m wrong about a lot of things,” Veronica replies. A smile maps itself artificially onto her features.

JD grins beautifully behind Martha. _Babe,_ he says casually, coat flapping around his legs, _I never thought you’d say that, not in my lifetime._ He helpfully does not clarify whether he means her missing him or being wrong. Observing the look on his face, Veronica’s fairly sure he means both. But then JD glances down at his body, presses his index and middle finger along his torso, and pulls them back bloody. He chuckles darkly. _Guess I was kind of right after all._

Martha says her name again. Veronica pulls herself back from staring at her dead boyfriend and nods wordlessly at whatever Martha’s talking about.

She gets roped into another movie night with Martha and McNamara that way. Maybe that’s for the best. If she reads one more word of Dostoevsky, she’s going to hang herself in her closet after all.

\---

If there’s one thing school does do for her, it’s that it distracts her from the ghosts. They fade into the background after a while - essays and applications and homework and just the daily grind. It wears them down until they nearly become nothing. Veronica writes reports and gives presentations and solves problems, and it all feels so good that she nearly forgets. She can’t truly forget, of course.

She has friends. She lives. She goes to football games, and laughs about gossip, watching as freshmen make fools of themselves and learn to do better. She aces her tests, and she sees the school counselor once in a while, and she pretends that she’s normal.

Winter break comes around and destroys it.

The moment she doesn’t have something else occupying her thoughts - schoolwork done, applications waiting for review, no friends to see - she glances up from her diary to see JD’s hands on the end of her bed. He’s leaning forward hungrily, grinning widely. He looks cleaner than she remembers. Or maybe her memory of what he looked like in those last moments has faded even slightly.

_Hey there, beautiful_ , he says wickedly.

Veronica draws her knees up to her chest. The last time they were like this - the last time they were anything close to this - was after Chandler choked on drain cleaner. He had climbed in through her window again and made it exactly clear what he wanted to do, leaning on the bed like that before undressing her and eating her out like he was starving.

“No,” she says automatically, gaze fixed on the middle of his torso instead of his eyes. Inevitably their eyes meet, though.

He arches an eyebrow. _No to what?_

Her immediate response is so stupid that she forces it back down. Veronica reconstructs it into something properly biting. “I’ve really enjoyed my few months without crushing guilt, thanks, so why don’t you fucking evaporate like usual?”

_Well_ , he breathes. _Still angry, huh?_

“Never doubt it,” Veronica growls, and then she grins, lightning-quick and horrible. “What’s that other thing Baudelaire wrote? _Remembering is only a new form of suffering?_ I’ve taken that one to heart. And I'm really tired of suffering.”

Suddenly he’s right there, leaning over her, one hand on the wall propping him up, the other next to her on the bed. Veronica automatically shoves herself backwards, back slamming up against the headboard. He’s her hallucination, so she logically knows (as if there’s any logic fucking left in her life) that he can’t do shit to her, but there’s still the visceral memory of their fight in the boiler room, the purpling bruises to her ribs and face. _Veronica, I could help you_ , he practically _moans_ in overdramatic despair, and the longing in his voice is the most accurate thing her mangled patchwork version of him has pulled yet. _See, doesn’t it make sense, why I'm still around? You killed me, but you didn’t kill the part of you that knows how right I am._

JD glances down at his hands. They’re still covered with ash and a little singed. _How right I was_ , he corrects.

“I didn’t kill you,” she hisses. “You killed you, asshole, and you left me to pick up all the fucking pieces.”

_Tell me you miss me_. His eyes are wild, pinning her against the headboard even without his hands assisting. _Say it. Just once_.

“Go to hell,” Veronica says, and sits up so that she moves right through him, dispelling him into empty air.

Chandler, from the corner of the room as she inspects her nails: _Jesus, Veronica. Maybe don’t hop on the psychotic asshole’s dick next time. See what it gets you? Like, Kurt and Ram were pushy, but at least they’re not trying to bang you when they’re dead._

From one fucked situation to another.

Veronica flops back down onto her bed and rolls herself over onto her stomach, burying her face in the pillow and inhaling. Trying to get the smell of ash out of her nose. Trying to drown herself in a darkness so infinite that it could bury every single one of the bodies she’s carrying with her.

\---

Harvard accepts her with a full ride scholarship. Veronica sobs it out over the letter at the table with her parents, crying out of some strange cocktail of excitement and fear. She pins the letter against her chest all the way up the stairs, trying to feel liberated even as her steps grow heavier and heavier. But for once, there’s no one waiting for her at the top - no prim comment from a girl with hair tied back in the same red scrunchie that now sits on Veronica’s bedside table, and no snark from a boy draped in a dark trenchcoat.

There’s just her, as if even her ghosts have been banished by the singular joy of this moment.

And yet, for all the relief that should bring, Veronica mostly feels very empty standing in the doorway to her room, high quality paper crinkling against her chest.

\---

She finally goes to the graveyard during spring break.

Veronica is loaded down with flowers. She picked up a book on Victorian flower language from the library before buying them, so now there’s additional context. Four bouquets - lavender heather (solitude, admiration, and the irony to the name alone) for Chandler, matching purple hyacinths (forgiveness) for Kurt and Ram, and butterfly weed for JD.

She gets through the first three graves easily enough. Veronica doesn’t have many words left for them. She does pause and place a hand on Chandler’s gravestone, beautifully made. “I think you could’ve been good too,” she murmurs, grip tightening on the stone, “if you had enough time. To grow up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I took that away from you.”

Her voice rattles around in her chest. She swallows it back down.

JD’s gravestone is a squat and unimpressive thing. It looks exactly as terrible as she suspected it would.

She stares down at the bouquet she’s got gripped in her hands. _Butterfly weed_ , JD murmurs. _What’s that about?_ Veronica had taken three times as long to pick his bouquet compared to anyone else’s. She had nearly bought yellow carnations - rejection and disdain - or orange lilies - outright hatred. Hell, she had briefly considered a black rose as some kind of sick joke. Death and more death. That's all the two of them were.

But she settled on this - the butterfly weed, bright orange growths tiny and odd.

“Beloved son,” she reads aloud, eyeing the tombstone, “gone too soon. What generic shit.”

_Yeah, well. My dad wasn’t the creative type_. That almost gets a laugh out of her, a choking sickened thing from the back of her throat. Big Bud Dean left town not three days after he buried his son, seemingly eager to get away from the scrutiny that the suicide had moved onto him. Veronica had fumed for days afterwards. She had wanted someone to dig deeper, to expose the man for the horrible warped thing he was.

But you couldn’t get everything.

“I’m still sorry that you’re dead.” She chews on her lip for a moment. “I’m - not sorry that I saved everyone else over you. They deserved it. You didn’t. And - I guess I loved you. I don’t know. We didn’t get enough time to figure it out, and maybe we would’ve been done after high school, y’know? Maybe twenty years from now I wouldn’t even have remembered your name. But now I’m just kind of. Stuck with you. Forever.”

_Don’t sound so fucking depressed about it_ , JD snaps behind her.

She ignores him and squares her shoulders. “So I guess you got your wish like that. You’re mine forever, in that you’re this fucking weight I’m going to carry until I’m dead. So, good job. Dickhead.” Veronica can feel herself starting to tear up. For once she doesn’t even try to stop it. “And I think part of me still loves you, or the guy you were pretending to be in the cafeteria and in all of the little moments afterwards. But I can’t forget the rest. I can’t wipe away the shit you did. So I spent like, a whole day of my spring break fucking reasoning out what stupid flowers to get you. I guess I care after all.”

There’s a wet inhale. She wipes a tear away. “I didn’t know what would get you to go away. Really go away. I thought maybe recognizing our love would do it, but that never stopped you before. So I’m just going to say it.” Veronica sets the bouquet down just so she doesn’t have to hold it as her palms grow damp with sweat. “This is me letting you go. And this.” She gestures down at the bouquet. “Is me asking you to let me go. Just let me fucking go, you stupid - narcissistic _moron_.”

Now she’s outright crying. Veronica kind of hates herself for it. She straightens. Thinks back to the final moments of his life ( _cool guys like you out of my life_ ) and scrubs away the tears. JD’s perched on his gravestone, grinning at her wildly.

Like this was what he wanted. Maybe it was just that simple all along.

Well, it’s not simple. It’s actually stupidly difficult.

She heaves out a few more quiet sobs. He waits politely. Veronica sniffles a little and coughs, trying to clear out her airways. “Look,” she says, and it’s not strong, God no, it’s barely even her voice. But it’s something, which is empirically better than nothing. “Don’t take it personally, babe, but I’m not wasting the rest of my life telling your fucking story.”

JD smiles. For once, he doesn’t say a damn word. And then he’s gone.

\---

Veronica isn’t quite the valedictorian. Instead, she’s the salutatorian, there to open the graduation. It feels more correct - allowing her to begin rather than end something. Most of her speech is stock-standard high school stuff - how much they’ve all grown together, how far they all have to go, how this is just the beginning of the rest of their lives. There’s a little more nuance to it than that, of course, but the administration wouldn’t let her slip in anything too overt referencing the disasters of junior year.

_God forbid anyone commit suicide at graduation_ , she snaps to herself.

But she concludes it simply, in the only way that she can. Raskolnikov, when considering a man on the edge of the execution, thinks of how much that man must fixate on being able to live just a little longer, no matter how tortured the state. Chandler, Kurt, and Ram are all assembled on the end of the row, seem more interested in harassing each other than listening to her speech. Most of the student body is placid and bored, glancing at anything else. They don’t want to hear her fucking speech.

Ironically: they don’t _deserve_ her fucking speech. Not really. But they’re getting it anyway.

There is one exception. JD smiles and kicks his feet in the front row, his trenchcoat nearly blending in with the sea of black graduation robes. His attention is entirely focused on her.

It’s the only time he’s shown up since spring break.

“You’re going to hear a lot today,” Veronica says, her hands resting on the podium, “about what you should do with the rest of your lives. As much as I have to allow those statements to be said, I respectfully disagree. There are going to be harder times than these past four years we’ve shared - maybe not by much, but they’re going to be harder. There is only one thing you can do - the highest calling we all share.”

JD leans forward, nearly entranced. He mouths the words along with her.

Veronica takes a deep breath. “That is - only to live, to live and live.” A lump forms in her throat. But she refuses. She banishes it, swallowing that particular pill of bitter cynicism back down.

“Life,” she says, certain in this one thing and nothing else, “whatever it may be.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from (who could've guessed) _Crime and Punishment_.


End file.
